Vortices for computing: the engines of turbulence simulation

Vortices have been described as the “sinews of turbulence”. They are also, increasingly, the computational engines driving numerical simulations of turbulence. In this paper, I review some recent advances in vortex-based numerical methods for simulating high Reynolds number turbulent flows. I focus on coherent vortex simulation, where nonlinear wavelet filtering is used to identify and track the few high energy multiscale vortices that dominate …